


Hunting the Hunter

by DorothyOz



Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: Crime, F/M, violence (not graphic)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-16
Updated: 2012-09-17
Packaged: 2017-11-14 09:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/513650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DorothyOz/pseuds/DorothyOz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cam said, “Either you believe in the system or you don’t, and I do.” But she isn’t the only one that believes in the system. Booth does too and with Pelant on the hunt he’ll have to do it more than ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the A/N at the beginning of the story, and enjoy! :D

 

**HUNTING THE HUNTER**

* * *

  
 

**A/N: please read**

**Title:** Hunting the Hunter

**Summary:** Cam said, “Either you believe in the system or you don’t, and I do.” But she isn’t the only one that believes in the system. Booth does too and with Pelant on the hunt he’ll have to do it more than ever.

**Genre:** Angst, drama, NOT canon

**Season and spoilers:** Season 7 – episodes 6 (“The Crack in the Code”) and 13 (“The Past in the Present”)

**Pairing:** Booth/Brennan

**Rating:** T

**Warnings:** Violence, crime (like you’d see in the show), and NOT A B&B HAPPY ENDING!!

**Comments:** Okay, so I have serious issues with the whole Pelant story line… it’s like building a house of cards on the surface of Jupiter… it makes no sense whatsoever... but the finale really annoyed me. I’ve lost my patience with Brennan and Booth demanded to speak up and tell us his version. I’ll do my best to put it into paper for you.

**Disclaimer:** Read profile

**Acknowledgements:** Big thanks to my beta [Whatever55](https://www.fanfiction.net/u/801814/whatever55) for her great job

**Cover art:**  [here](http://dorothyoz1939.livejournal.com/5535.html) and [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2310182)

* * *

**HUNTING THE HUNTER**

* * *

  **Prologue**

* * *

 

It’s been a week.

It’s been a week since she left, since she ran with our daughter.

A week that I’ve spent without my baby or the woman I felt like I could call my wife. In that short week, just seven days, so many things changed, so many things were broken.

The world turned and we can’t turn the clock back.

* * *

The first time I felt the world turning was on the stairs of my church. They had just run away not even two minutes earlier and Max had run in the other direction moments later. I was seated defeated on the stairs and all my arguments against her running, all the words I uttered trying to convince her not to listen to her father, came back to me. All the ways I could protect her here but could not if she ran, everything I said haunted me then. All the words that she ignored resounded in my head. I barely could contain my emotions: my fear, my anger, when I pulled my phone and called Flynn and hoped that he believed me. My speech was failing me and I almost couldn’t tell him what the hell had happened before my stomach had enough. I could hear Flynn calling my name, trying to get me to answer his questions while I vomited the few contents that my stomach was holding at the time. I’ll always be grateful for Father Keyes. Seeing my car still parked there, he exited the church to see why we were still there and found me. He took the phone from me and translated what little he understood of my ramblings to Flynn.

Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later, Flynn and the squints were there. They checked my car and discovered that Max disconnected the battery to stop me from chasing them. They also found a letter from Brennan apologizing to me and telling me that she was doing the best she could do to protect our daughter and our family.

But I knew better. She ran because she didn’t trust me or the team to keep her and our daughter safe. She didn’t trust me and she was on the run. That wasn’t the worst though. The worst was that Pelant had made her his prey and hiding and running wasn’t going to help. I was a sniper, a hunter by definition, I knew, as I know that God exists, that if Pelant decided to hunt them, both of them could end up dead. She was risking my daughter’s life.

Fortunately, my sick appearance at the church convinced Flynn that I wasn’t an accomplice. It didn’t put me back on the case, but Flynn decided that he needed me to find Brennan and that I could help with that. Again, I was grateful, this time to the man that could have not trusted me but did, the man that later listened to my expertise when it was needed.

The second time the world turned it almost spun off of it axis. Flynn took me, the FBI techs, and the squints to what was my house until that day. Father Keyes refused to leave my side and came with us. The house needed to be searched from top to bottom and I just opened the doors for them.

With no more energy left, I was going to just collapse on the outside steps but the priest took upon himself to get me into the house and into my daughter’s room. I really didn’t want to get into the house but I didn’t have the energy to argue either, so I just let him drag me in there. I felt like a rag doll but eventually we sat together on the floor in Christine’s room.

Angela found my alarm clock tampered with to record conversations and send them to a computer out there somewhere. It wasn’t the only thing tampered with. Our laptops had some kind of hidden virus that fed information to a different computer. The son of a bitch even hooked up the baby’s cam to it.

I was still seated on the floor of my baby’s room when Flynn came to talk to me. If Brennan were here he would now have two suspects: Brennan herself and an unknown person who had tampered with everything. But with her gone everything could be explained by her need to stay up to date with the case. I argued against the cam situated in the baby’s room being a way of monitoring the case but he just pointed out that it was the only camera in the house and that I was indeed in that room now. With no arguments against it, he had no other option than to keep considering her the prime suspect, a fugitive, and he had to add kidnapping and endangering Christine to the charges. She took the baby, Flynn could not ignore that.

Somehow those words gave me some strength back. She didn’t trust me to keep them safe, and she didn’t trust the system. But I am the system, I believe in the system and this was not the way to do it. If she had trusted me, she would be here; she wouldn’t be a fugitive; Flynn wouldn’t have to accuse her of kidnapping and he would have leverage to look for another suspect.

I agreed with him; told him to do it, but I added something. The surveillance meant only one thing: Pelant was on the hunt for Brennan and he may even have been waiting for this. Flynn promised to do his best to get both of them back safe.

I couldn’t stay in the house one more second and they took me to the lab; to Angela’s office and I let my body collapse on her couch. We needed a plan, but I was in no condition to formulate one. The squints were feeling sad and guilty; it was plenty obvious that they felt responsible for not catching Pelant before this happened.

At some point, during our fruitless debate Caroline came into the lab, followed by David Barron, her ex-husband in tow claiming to be my lawyer. She took a look at us, deemed that we needed rest and practically ordered us home. Flynn knew that she was right and that we weren’t going to get anything done that night, so he ordered the squints to go home and rest and to come the next morning ready to go over everything again. They needed to follow the evidence. If Pelant was guilty they needed to prove it and they needed to prove it fast. He was already unaccounted for, already under the radar, and if I was right he was after Brennan and my daughter.

The squints nodded and left looking depressed. Flynn left too, with a promise of returning my baby to me alive. Flynn has two little boys and I knew he really would do his best. Only Caroline, David, Father Keyes and Cam stayed behind with me. Caroline, like the priest, could do nothing but stick with me for moral support. Yet her presence seemed to calm me somehow.

Cam had called Rebecca and explained everything to her and to my surprise she wasn’t angry at me. She tried to comfort me telling me that it wasn’t my fault, that I would find them in time. She promised that I could talk with Parker whenever I want and we agreed to wait until I found them to explain everything to Parker. Rebecca talked to me as I was going to find them tomorrow, confident that by the time Parker visited me during the summer they would be back home. I didn’t expect her compassion and her trust in me but I was glad to receive them.

When I ended the call, Cam offered me her guest room to stay as long as I needed. I wanted to accept because I couldn’t bear going back to my house, not today, maybe never, but my body wasn’t answering my commands. I was probably in shock. She noticed how much time I took answering, and she tried again. This time she asked me to go with her: she feared for Michelle. I nodded and Cam and the priest helped to pull me up from the couch.

They put me in Cam’s car and David promised to visit me the next morning to go over the case. So did Father Keyes who promised to have my family in his prayers and to help me through this crisis however he could.

I don’t remember much of the trip to Cam’s house or how she got me into her spare bed. I barely remember the next morning: my meeting with David, being in the lab, talking with Flynn… everything was blurry and mixed up together. Day after day, they all looked the same, they mixed together and I could hardly tell one from the other. I remember our accomplishments clearly though.

During the rest of the week the squints worked undeterred and proved that Pelant manipulated the GPS ankle monitor using the chips on the books. It destroyed his alibi: he was now a viable suspect for all the crimes. They went over Brennan’s car again and Hodgins proved that the last time it was at the asylum was two weeks prior to Ethan Sawyer’s murder with some pollen on the tires. It contradicted the evidence that Sawyer’s hair gave the FBI against her: it was reasonable doubt. Flynn officially added Pelant to the suspect list and when Angela finally proved that someone changed the time stamp of the asylum security cameras and that Brennan never paid Caroline off, he took her off of the list. Brennan was no longer a suspect in Sawyer’s murder, but evading justice and taking the baby couldn’t be ignored. He could not look the other way around. Angela was angry about that until Caroline pointed out that no one would want to prosecute that case and her friend would probably get a deal and avoid jail.

What she failed to mention to the angered artist was that her custody over Christine could be in question, especially if her escape put them both at risk. In fact, David had already suggested for me to file for full custody, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even knowing in my heart that our relationship was dead, I couldn’t do it. It would mean admitting that I didn’t think that Brennan was keeping my baby girl safe and while I knew that running had put them in a bigger risk than staying, I couldn’t admit that. If I admitted that… if Brennan wasn’t keeping her safe… I couldn’t even bring myself to think about the alternative.

But the truth was that we didn’t know where she and the baby were, or where Max was, or where Pelant was. We knew nothing. Our inability to contact her or Max directly meant that the only way to let her know that she was no longer a suspect of murder was the press. We told the press the story, giving no details and admitting that we had no suspects to not tip off Pelant, but we told them that Brennan was cleared from the suspect list and then all hell broke loose again. The bitter feeling in my gut that had been with me since I saw her car drive away kept telling me that Brennan and Christine wouldn’t be safe until they were back home and it turned unbearable when Flynn knocked at Cam’s door this morning.

There was a body that looked like Pelant’s handy work in the close proximity to my church. When we got there Hodgins, and Wendell were already examining the body. It was badly decomposed but the moment I saw the cheekbone implants I knew in my gut whose body this was. Cam’s estimation of height and weight matched, and an hour later Angela’s facial reconstruction confirmed that my worst nightmare was a reality and I found myself practically in the same position I started in a week earlier: collapsed on the stairs empting my stomach on them. The only difference was the stairs themselves, this time I was on the stairs of the platform in the lab instead of on the church’s steps.

It’s been a week.

It’s been a week since she left, since she ran with our daughter.

A week that I’ve spent without my baby or the woman I felt like I could call my wife. In that short week, the world turned and we can’t turn the clock back. Max Kennan had been dead that whole week, Brennan and my daughter had been on their own since then. On their own and being hunted by a psychopath. He’s a week ahead of us and if I don’t find them fast he is going to kill them both.

I believe in the system and she didn’t.

She ran and I stayed.

Now I have to hunt the prey or the hunter before the hunter eats the prey.

* * *

 


	2. Chapter 2

This morning we found Max Kennan’s body. He’s been dead the whole week. He was killed the same day that Brennan ran away with our daughter.

The surveillance found in the house I used to share with Brennan and the tampered equipment told me that Pelant was hunting Brennan. Killing Max proved that he had been waiting for them to run; he had been expecting it. He was a week ahead of us.

This psychopath was hunting Brennan and my baby girl and all I could do was vomit on the stairs of the platform in the lab.

Flynn stood beside me, gave some water, and snapped me out my shock by asking just one question. “How do we hunt down this guy?”

I looked at him not understanding his question. He was the agent here; it was his case. Why was he asking me? Yes, during the past week we proved that Brennan was innocent or at least we created enough doubt to convince Flynn to board his suspect’s pool. He took Brennan out of his suspect’s list but I didn’t think that he was convinced of her innocence. And yes, he considered Pelant a suspect, but only because there was a lot of manipulated technology in the case and he was a hacker. There was no proof against him, solid or otherwise. I knew that we hadn’t convinced Flynn that Pelant was our guy, yet. Or so I thought.

“I thought that you didn’t believe us,” Angela voiced my doubts about the other agent to the agent himself.

Flynn nodded, understanding our disbelief. “I didn’t. I believed that you believed her innocent and Pelant guilty. But you created enough doubt for me to go over his interrogation tape… and… well, no cop would see that and not believe him guilty, at least of the other crimes… I still have my doubts about Sawyer’s murder. But Christine’s safety has to be my priority, so I’m willing to trust you for now.”

“Okay, so what do we do now?” Cam asked. “We’ve gone over all the evidence over and over again, and we still can’t prove him guilty nor can we find him.”

“Which is why I was asking Booth,” Flynn told the squints. “Booth, you’re the best prepared here to hunt down a psycho… I hate admitting it, but I need your expertise here… but, everything goes by me. You’re way too close to the case,” he added the last part seriously, letting me know that if I break the rules I was out again.

I nodded numbly at his words. If asking permission to take a piss was going to get me in the case I’ll ask like a good little boy. I needed to find my daughter. I needed my baby girl back in my arms.

Wendell was the first to speak. “We do have new evidence, Dr. Saroyan,” he said pointing to Max’s body.

“Yes, we do,” Cam admitted, allowing her sorrow at the situation to show on her face.

It was obvious that none of us were completely out of the shock. Seeing Max Kennan, the man that killed, gutted, and torched the FBI Deputy Director to protect his daughter, dead had affected all of us greatly.

However, I found myself unsurprised by it. Max was the obstacle that Pelant needed to overcome to get Brennan. This was the first logical move for him.

“So we study the evidence we found at the crime scene and Max’s body,” Hodgins said.

“Max’s car,” I whispered. Brennan left in one car, and Max ran in the opposite direction, he must have had another car.

“You think that Max had another car?” Flynn asked. “But that means that they ran in two different directions and then planned on meeting someplace.”

“Yes, if you followed Brennan they would need a second car,” I pointed out simply. Max would have thought of that: changing cars is a classic move to confuse the cops.

Concentrating on the case, on finding Brennan and our baby, it made me feel less useless and my mind started clearing some. For the first time since they ran away, I felt that I could really start thinking logically. I felt stronger than I have felt all week.

I stood up. I was shaking, but at least my legs supported me. My steps were unsteady, but I managed to join the team in the platform and I rested my body on the handrail facing the squints.

“Okay, I’ll have the FBI search the area to see if we find it, but for all we know he could have taken it.”

“No. This guy is a planner; he would have had a plan in place for this situation so he would have his own car,” I argued. I was convinced of this. Pelant had planned everything to the detail. He wouldn’t have left the car to fate.

“You think that he planned all this, that he had a plan in place in case she escaped?” Flynn asked, unsure of the veracity of my words.

“I think he had a plan for both cases. Why do you think I called Hacker and manipulated him into putting extra security measures for Brennan in prison?” I almost shouted, frustrated. I couldn’t stop the feeling that Flynn didn’t know how dangerous Pelant really was and that was frustrating me. He asked for my expertise; yet he was arguing every step of the way.

“There’s no record of that call,” Flynn said, clearly demanding an explanation from me.

“There is. Just not where you were looking. I didn’t want to set up a time for Christine’s baptism on the phone. He had changed our ring tones. He had manipulated a call…I couldn’t know what else he had tampered with. So I went there to talk to the priest in person and called from his office,” I explained as patiently as I could. I felt angry. All my preparations were useless.

Flynn nodded. He guy was thinking hard, I could tell. I could practically see the smoke coming out of his head from him attempting to use his brain for a change. I probably would have found it amusing if it had been a normal case. “So again, Booth, how do we hunt down this guy?”

“We follow the evidence,” Wendell said. “We have Max’s body. You find for us Max’s car so that we can go over it too… and if we find nothing we look again.”

I nodded. Wendell was right, or at least, partially right. The squints needed to go over all the new evidence. I didn’t think that they would find anything though.

“You need to investigate his life, all of it,” Sweets said bursting into the lab. We all turned to look at him surprised to see the shrink. Flynn glared at him. He shouldn’t have been here, he was off the case and he obviously didn’t like the shrink disobeying him. “What? You didn’t really expect me to go home and just sit while this is happening, right?”

The looks on our faces must have told him that we did, so he shut up until Flynn reminded him that he was off the case and that he shouldn’t even be here. “I can help and I’ll obey you the entire time, Agent Flynn,” he said in his most convincing voice.  “And I promise that the next time my profile matches to more than one person I will let you come to that decision on your own so that I don’t hurt your feelings again.”

Flynn allowed Sweets to stay but before he could talk again, I did it, “Sweets is right. Pelant had been like this all his life, we need to investigate him in depth. And Angela, I need you to keep looking through all his hacker thingies, especially the library scheme.”

“Okay, but why? I already know how it works… I’ll keep trying to prove that it was him, but how is that going to help us to find Bren and Christine?”

“Because he doesn’t know that. He’s arrogant; he thinks that his alibi is fool proof, that we could never find out how he manipulated the GPS system. He thinks that his system is perfect,” I stated.

“You think that he may use it again,” Angela said.

I nodded. I not only thought that he would use it again I hoped that he would because the truth was that he had planned for both scenarios while I only planned for one. I thought that I had succeeded in convincing her to stay; I didn’t and now we were a week behind Pelant.

I was angry at Brennan for not trusting me, but I was also angry at myself for not preventing this. I needed to save them. I couldn’t go back to Brennan, but I wanted her safe. I wanted my baby safe.

I did my best to concentrate on the case. Flynn, Sweets, and I started investigating Pelant’s life while the rest of the squints did their thing.

Soon we had results. Angela discovered that there was a glitch in the baby’s camera that matched the time of her baptism. It didn’t record anything during two minutes. That was probably when Pelant went into the house and manipulated everything. The house is only forty minutes away from my church, by car he would have gotten there just about when the service ended. But he couldn’t have known the details of the baptism… and even if he had found them somehow… How did he found them? And did he kill Max in the middle of the street and in the middle of the day?

He found Max, killed him and returned him to the church a week after actually killing him. He had a good plan, and his elaborated crime scenes meant that he was playing with us. He was confident enough in his plan to play with us and that was terrifying.

The scariest thing wasn’t that though. Almost at midnight, Cam found a photograph from an old Polaroid inside Max’s thoracic cavity. When Angela cleaned and restored it we saw Christine’s crib and on the reverse an address.

We went to the address: Flynn, Cam and I. Cam got her old revolver out of her office and refused to let me go alone with Flynn. However, when we got there and I saw that the SWAT team was waiting for us I told her to stay outside.

The place looked like an old abandoned house, a normal family house where someone had lived happy in the past. It looked calm and quiet, peaceful even, but Pelant had directed us here so I was sure that it was anything but peaceful. My gut was again telling me that tonight wasn’t going to be a good night.

Johnson, the team leader, walked to us when Flynn’s SUV stopped. He wordlessly gave me a vest and a rifle. He looked at Flynn closely and ordered him to stay with Cam. Flynn argued, but Johnson just ignored him, which clearly pissed Flynn off. If it weren’t such a tense situation I probably could have laughed at the look of fury and irritation that was on his face.

We got into position. Johnson used hand commands to order me to stay behind him as we prepared to go in.

A week and a day had passed since Brennan ran away with our baby. The same amount of time had passed since Pelant killed Max. Pelant himself gave us this address today when he left Max’s body for us to find.

I heard the door being busted open and the smell of death caught me. I could only pray that what I found inside would not be my baby girl.


	3. Chapter 3

A week and a day ago Brennan ran with our daughter. Max planned the escape and planned to stay with her, but Pelant killed him that very same day.

From that point on Pelant forced us to play his psychotic game. He left Max’s body for us to find and in his thoracic cavity a photo of my daughter’s crib with an address on the reverse. The address took us to a normal family house that looked abandoned.

The SWAT team was there waiting for us and as I followed the team leader through the busted door I prayed with all my might that we weren’t late. I prayed that Brennan and my baby were safe. I prayed to not find my baby girl inside.

My prayers were answered. I’ll thank God for it every day for the rest of my life. What we found inside, while disgusting, wasn’t my baby girl.

We found a body though. A man seated in a wheelchair, his legs cut in pieces on the floor, another Polaroid photograph in his mouth, Brennan’s last novel in one of his hands and in the other a pacifier.

I did my best to not throw up again. It seemed to have become my reaction to everything nowadays. Johnson looked me in the eye and told me to concentrate on finding the son of a bitch that was doing this. Johnson’s blind trust in me kept me grounded long enough to do a cursory search of the house.

There was nothing more in the house but there was an old car in the garage… and blood, lots of blood. They sent everything to the lab: the body, the car… anything with the smallest, tiniest, drops of blood. The squints swept the house too, looking for evidence.

Meanwhile I waited outside trying to calm myself. I was seated in Flynn’s SUV with the door open. Flynn was with the squints gathering evidence so he wasn’t there to bother me. Johnson came to me. He got inside the car, sat on the driver’s side, and closed the door. He glared at me and I followed his lead and closed the door on my side too. He came to give me a pep talk. Not the first one he had given me in my time in the FBI but probably the most important one he ever would.

“I should have done something to prevent this… how is it that I didn’t notice that she was going to run?”

“Look kid, there’s nothing you could have done to stop the psycho from playing his bloody games. Your girl should have stayed and fought, but you couldn’t force her to do it. Are we clear, kid?” he asked me, locking his eyes with mines.

I nodded numbly. He was not satisfied with it though. He asked again and again, more forcefully each time, until he got a firm enough, “yes, sir,” out of my lips.

“Good.” He was silent for a few minutes. “Now, about not seeing that she was going to run… no man wants to see that his wife, and don’t tell me that you weren’t married, you had a life and a baby together. If that’s not being married I’m a slimy paper pusher like Hacker…” He stopped me from arguing with his snarky reply. Johnson liked to call a spade a spade, and he didn’t like when people argued against it or him. He hated euphemisms and politically correct names, and if he had decided that Brennan was my wife, wife he was going to call her and no amount of arguing was going to change that to partner. “Like I was saying,” he continued, seeing that I was paying attention, “no man wants to see that his wife doesn’t trust him to protect his family. At least no man like us. Hacker may be happy hiding under the covers; neither of us knows how to do that.”

After my talk with Johnson I felt stronger. Strangely enough as hard as his words were to listen to they helped me. I went back to the lab ready to find Brennan and my baby before Pelant’s threats became a reality.

The squints examined the two bodies that we have and every scratch of evidence that we found on the house. Meanwhile, Flynn, Sweets, and I investigated the house. We needed two days but eventually we solved the mystery. Or at least most of it.

The house was property of Douglas Santora, an old FBI agent with no living family. Douglass landed in a wheelchair during an arrest that went south more than thirty years ago. After that he got a desk job in the Hoover until he retired. He was married to Isabel Santora, but they never had kids and she died of cancer two years ago.

Angela confirmed that the body was Santora, and the squints proved that all the blood in the house was either Max’s or Santora’s. There was no proof that anyone else had been in the house. The only indication that Pelant had been there was the mess he created and some spilled lubricant in the garage. He didn’t leave a single hair.

Cam discovered that Pelant overdosed Santora with his own morphine leaving him unconscious. Still not trusting the drug to do the job, the killer tied him to his bed and gagged him. She estimated that he kept him like that for a whole day and that he died the same day that Max had. The least tragic thing from that case was that all the work that Pelant did on his body was done after his death.

Angela examined the objects that Pelant left for us on Santora’s body. Brennan’s novel was torn, some pages were broken, some were missing… The pacifier was just a simple pink one that I could confirm wasn’t one of Christine’s basically ‘cause she didn’t have pacifiers. Brennan lectured me about how bad they are for babies after I bought a Hello Kitty one when I learned that she was going to be a girl. I didn’t understand a word of it. I used a pacifier, so did Parker… but I decided not to argue about that. We had bigger things to settle at the time than pacifiers, like finding a house for example. Plus she looked so convinced that even if I didn’t understand it, I believed her. Pelant must have bought the pacifier somewhere to make an effect, to make clear that his threats included my baby. And the photograph was just a photo of the car that was in the garage.

That Polaroid coupled with the luggage in the truck of the car: clothes for Brennan and Max, and baby’s clothes, a revolver, cash… it was obviously the car the Max was going to use for their little escapade. In the truck under the luggage there was a black body bag that the squints confirmed was used to transport Max’s body, and the driver’s seat was prepared for Pelant’s height not Max’s so we concluded that Pelant used it to transport Max’s body.

The squints also discovered how Max was killed. He was injected with the same weird drug that Sawyer had been injected with which knocked him out long enough for Pelant to drive to Santora’s house, where both Santora and Max were killed, and then he sliced his neck. Wendell found the tip of the dart used to do so lodged in his vertebrae, and when they compared the damage done and the metallic tip with the weapons database they found that Pelant used a blowgun.

“So Pelant attacked and immobilized Santora during the night. The next day while you were at the church he snuck into your house and planted surveillance devices. Then he got to Max, knocked him out with the poisoned dart, drove Max’s car with an unconscious Max to Santora’s house, killed them both, and prepared the crime scene for us,” Cam summarized what we knew. We were all seated in the lounge in the lab trying to make sense of what little evidence we had. “But why did he wait a week to give us Max’s body and lead us to Santora?”

“He’s playing a game with us,” Sweets piped in.

“I have a better question,” I said, “How did he get Max? And he left his body at the church… that’s no coincidence… he’s telling us that he knew we were there.”

“He could have followed him to the church,” Wendell suggested. “You said it yourself, he planned this in detail. He expected Dr. Brennan to run; he knew that if she were to run she would do it with her father’s help. Max was what separated him from her so he planned on taking him first… he must have been watching Max instead of Dr. Brennan.”

I nodded. Wendell was absolutely right. Max was his first target. He must have been controlling him all the time somehow. Only one problem with that…

“He couldn’t have followed us. He was in the house while we were in the church. He knew where and when the baptism was going to be, but how? I talked to the priest in person about it and I didn’t talk with Brennan about it on the phone. I told her at the house. You guys checked it for bugs and the only one you found was in the alarm clock and he must have planted it then,” I argued. This didn’t make sense. How the hell did he know to be at the church?

“We need to figure out how he found about the baptism and how he plans on finding Dr. B,” Hodgins pointed out the obvious. “And I need to find his vehicle, which by the way is a bike. The lubricant we found is for bikes, not cars. I’ll have a model today.”

“Okay, Hodgins you find that bike model for me. Sweets you keep searching in his past, see if anything pops out. Santora and Max were killed in Santora’s house, but we still don’t know where he did the rest. What he did with Inger Johannsen’s body needed time… and he couldn’t have prepared his tech thingies at his place in case someone came looking... he must have a place that we haven’t found yet,” I started giving orders. Flynn was glaring at me. He obviously didn’t like that I had taken control over the investigation. It was obvious that the squints were only listening to me too, so I guess he had finally given up on being in charge of the case and just decided to be officially in charge and oversee the investigation. It was good by me. He meant well, but he just wasn’t the sharpest pencil in the box.

I told Angela to look through the library scheme again. I wanted her to hack it and find any program that wasn’t supposed to be there. Anything. I was sure that Pelant was still using that. I hoped that his arrogance would be his downfall.

Flynn and I were helping Sweets with Pelant’s background while the squints did their squinting, when David came for a visit. He came to tell me that the judge had named me sole custodian of Christine and stripped Brennan from her rights over our baby pending the resolution of the charges against her. She had ruled that until the court made a decision on Sawyer’s murder, and the other charges that weighted over her: evading justice and kidnapping, with or without the aggravator of endangering Christine, she wouldn’t study the case again. David advised me not to appeal the ruling because that could make me look like an accomplice; risk my participation on the case, my career, and even my custody over my baby.

My feelings about it were mixed. I was happy to have full custody of my baby girl and relieved to know that she wouldn’t be able to run away with her again. Yet at the same time, I knew how it felt to not have access to your baby. I knew that even if Brennan never put a foot in prison, she would have a hard time recuperating custody of Christine. I was still very angry and disappointed in her; in her inability to trust me, even after all this time, making her run. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised though, for Brennan running is always the answer. Yet, I knew that she had done this very stupid thing in a desperate attempt to protect Christine.

I just nodded and didn’t argue with David. She had been trying to protect Christine but she had gone the worst possible way about it. The fact remained that if she had trusted me and listened to my words that day at the house we wouldn’t be in this situation. They wouldn’t be missing and being hunted by Pelant. Her attempt at protecting our baby wouldn’t have turned into risking both their lives.

Angela came to tell me something just in time to hear my conversation with David and she was furious. She started shouting at me until I yelled over her voice that if I lose custody Christine would end up in foster care. That shut her up, and I think that for the first time she really understood just how big a mess Brennan created by running, no matter how good her intentions were.

Calmer, she could tell me that she had found a program to read the position of a GPS tracker. The weird thing was that it pointed to the lab: the tracker was in the lab. I felt a pang in my gut. This couldn’t be good.

I got the squints to look through everything again. The tracker must have been in Max or in the car. They were just starting to look when I had a revelation: the car wasn’t Max’s car and Pelant needed to follow Max himself, so the tracker must have been on him. Cam and Wendell scanned the body while Angela and Hodgins went over Max’s clothes. Finally, it was Angela who found it in one of his shoes, in the sole to be accurate. Pelant must have replaced Max’s shoes with the tampered ones like he did with my alarm clock, and he probably did it before he even killed Sawyer.

This was always part of the plan, part of his game. He wanted to play with the squints to drown them in the impossibly of solving his murders and he wanted to kill Brennan, and if his threats were any indication, my daughter too.

It told me something else too. It told me why Pelant was never in a hurry to do anything. He always knew were Max was.

Did he know where Brennan was too? Was there another tracker?

 


	4. Chapter 4

It’s been ten days since Brennan ran with our daughter. She ran with Max’s help and he was supposed to protect them.

Pelant, however, had other plans.

Pelant drugged Douglas Santora, a retired FBI agent, and tied him to his own bed eleven days ago. He monitored Max’s every movement with a GPS tracker hidden in the sole of his shoes that had been there an unknown amount of time. Then, ten days ago, during Christine’s baptism he entered into what was our home, it no longer felt that way for me, and filled it with surveillance devices, and he did everything before going to my church in time to get Max when he left after the service. He rendered Max unconscious, took his car, and transported Max in it to Santora’s house. Once there, Pelant killed them both and prepared his twisted scene for us. Finally, to direct us to Santora’s house, he left a photograph of my baby’s crib with the address inside of Max’s thoracic cavity and planted the body for us at my church three days ago.

Pelant clearly wanted to play with us. He wanted to prove to us that he was smarter than us and created a psychotic game for us: he was hunting Brennan and our daughter and he was challenging us to stop him. The torn book and the pacifier found on Santora’s body proved it. That, of course, was on top of killing Max, spying on us, and everything else that he had been doing recently.

He had been planning his twisted, creepy game for a long time. We were way behind him and we needed to catch up and we needed to do it yesterday… or maybe a year ago.

“If he was monitoring Max, he probably knew that he got two cars for the escape,” I told the others. We were all together: the squints, Sweets, Flynn and I on the platform in the lab where minutes ago Angela had found the tracker in Max’s shoe. “Angela, I need you to find a second tracker in that library scheme… this son of a bitch probably put another one on Brennan.” Angela looked horrified at the idea but she nodded and practically ran to her office to do so. “The rest of us, either squint over what we have again or come with me to Cam’s office to keep investigating Pelant.”

With the orders uttered Wendell and Hodgins went back to squinting while Cam, Flynn, Sweets and I went to her office to find everything that there was to know about the psychopath.

Wendell and Hodgins didn’t find much, just more of that bike lubricant on some of the pieces of carpet brought from Santora’s house and even on some of his and Max’s clothes. They discovered that it was a fairly common bike lubricant highly recommended by Japanese manufactures so half of the owners of Hondas, Yamahas, Suzuki, and so on bought it. No help there.

However, Hodgins found minimum traces of soil in it. Pelant must have stepped on the lubricant and then scattered it around the house. I told Hodgins to analyze the sample to see if he could find where the soil came from and sent Wendell with Cam to search my house for either lubricant or soil to compare it to the samples that we already had.

Thankfully, they did find more lubricant all over the house: the entrance, the stairs, the corridors, all the way to and in the master bedroom and the nursery. These samples were also identical to the ones found in Santora’s house, and they had the same soil mixed with it.

Hodgins discovered that the soil was from the same area of the woods were Ethan Sawyer’s body was found. Not only that, the soil sample didn’t have the pollen that Brennan’s tires had proving that the sample was from the same week of his murder.

All this connected Santora’s and Max’s murders with the surveillance devices in the house and with the crime scene of Sawyer’s murder. It was a small victory, but we all felt that we were getting closer to catching this son of a bitch.

But the best part of the day was when way past dinner time, after hours on end looking through files and files trying to find more about Pelant, I finally found his damn psycho-cave.

Christopher Pelant was born from Eleanor Pelant, a single mother, thirty years ago in D.C. Sometime later, when Christopher was seven Eleanor Pelant got married to a widower, Daren Phillips. Daren had a son with his late wife, James, who was only two at the time. He never adopted Christopher as his own, therefore never giving him his name. Ten years ago, while Christopher was in college, Daren and Eleanor died in a car accident and the house that the spouses had shared was sold and the money split between the step-siblings. However, Daren never sold the house that he had shared with his late wife and left it to James in his will.

The interesting thing was that James still owned the house and he paid the bills: water, light, heat… the whole nine yards. He also ordered from the internet and paid with his credit card all kind of weird things: electric tooth brush, alarm clock, kid electric toys, Brennan’s last book, an old Polaroid from eBay… Weirdest thing of all was that the guy hadn’t been eating or working in over a year. The guy had in fact resigned from his job as a computer technician in a small company dedicated to maintain informatics systems of other small companies after working for them for three years by email and during Pelant’s trial for hankering into the web of the DOD.

“Damn! His first victim was his brother,” I exclaimed. Flynn and Sweets looked at me funny, probably trying to understand how I reached that conclusion. “Look at the activity of his credit card. Do you see any charge for food in the last year?” Both men shook their heads. “There you go.”

“Booth, he could have paid in cash,” Sweets argued and I looked at him hard trying to make him think a little bit harder. “Okay, it’s unlikely that he always had cash for it and he never made withdraws… always paid with the card… oh, god! You’re right, Booth!”

“Okay, even if he killed his step brother, how we prove it? The food thing is cool here but I don’t think that it’d get us a warrant for his house,” Flynn pointed out not very helpfully.

“I’m calling James’ ex-boss and Daren Phillips’ lawyer. You, Flynn, are going to look and find his resume and check every damn piece of data. And you, Sweets, are going to call the system, Pelant never took James when their parents died so must have went into foster care,” I ordered. I was already dialing the company’s number. We had no time to lose. We needed to convince a judge that James Phillips was dead and that someone, probably Pelant because he was one of the few that knew about that house, was assuming his identity in order to commit murder.

Daren Phillips’ lawyer told me that he was also the executor of his will and that he had seen the two boys only two times: at the time of the death of Mr. and Mrs. Phillips and when James turned eighteen. He sold the house shortly after the spouses’ death and split the money like the will said: he gave Pelant his half because he was already twenty and in college, and he put James’ half in a trust fund. When James turned eighteen he emptied the fund and gave the money to James; that was the last time he saw either of them.

James’ ex-boss told me that James was a good and smart guy who worked hard, but he thought that he was way too smart for the job and a little weird. He told me that the guy suddenly resigned approximately a year ago by email saying that he wanted to travel around the world. Frankly, he thought that the guy had been hired by some big informatics company and he didn’t want to tell. He also sent us his resume, and surprise, surprise… it had a photograph… of Pelant instead of James.

“This is enough for that warrant. Pelant is clearly impersonating James and he’s a person of interest in five murders. He doesn’t have an ankle monitor anymore so he doesn’t have an alibi for the last two, and his alibi for the other three is a burst thanks to Angela and Sawyer’s split message,” I told them smirking. We got him, I could feel it.

“I talked with James’ social worker. Nothing useful there but he sent us his file. Again it doesn’t have anything useful but his last photo from his eighteenth birthday. I called the schools and everything checks out,” Sweets said. “So he must have killed him sometime after the second meeting with the lawyer and his job interview.”

“I found a James Phillips in American University. He got a Bachelor in Computer Science; he started in 2005 and graduated in 2009. But look at the photo of the guy,” Flynn said waving the printed file. The photo in James Phillips’ file was Christopher Pelant.

“So James gets his part of the inheritance and Pelant kills him. Then he assumes his identity and keeps him ‘alive’ even getting him a degree and a job,” I deduced at loud. “But when he hacked into the web of DOD and got caught , he had to make James disappear so ‘James’ resigned from his job and went traveling around the world, and during the six months that Pelant was in jail there are no bills or anything else shipped to James’ house. When Pelant got his parole and house arrest… bang! His step brother ‘returned’ and there are bills again, but he didn’t got the job back and he started buying only weird stuff. Weird stuff that I’m sure the squints could prove that was used to do all kind of illegal and psycho stuff!”

“And it’s probably at James’ house,” Flynn said. “I’ll call the judge.”

“Sweets, get the squints. I’m gonna call the Hoover and get a SWAT team,” I ordered the shrink and immediately made my call.

I could hear Flynn talking with the judge on the phone and looking more annoyed every second. At the end, with a look of exasperation, he gave me the phone grunting that the judge wanted to talk to me. Seconds later the judge gave the go ahead and Flynn’s exasperated look got murderous.

Honestly, I didn’t give a damn. Flynn’s pride was way low in my priority list. We had what we needed James’ address and a warrant to search the house.

We took the squints and met with the SWAT team there. Again Johnson allowed me in the team and left Flynn behind, and again the SWAT team checked the house and then let the squints squint.

Inside the house, we found a basement with two rooms. In the first one there was a bunch of techy stuff; a creepy panel where he kept photos and cuttings talking about the squints and the cases that we have solved together in the past, and some clothes including a pair of boots with lubricant on the bottom. Hodgins was sure that it would be the same bike lubricant and that it probably would have some of that soil. The second one was his ‘workplace’ and it was full of blood and all kind of medical and weird instruments also covered in blood… and a bang stick like the ones used to kill Inger Johannsen and Ezra Krane.

Back in the lab, the squints proved that the blood in Pelant’s ‘workplace’ was Inger’s, so was the blood on the instruments. He had killed and mutilated her body there. They also found a scalpel with Ethan Sawyer’s blood. And, like Hodgins predicted, the lubricant on the boots was the same from the other scenes and it had the same soil from the woods were Sawyer’s body was found.

We had him.

We could prove that he assumed James Phillips’ identity which tied him to the house and with what we found in the house so far we had him for Inger’s and Sawyer’s murderers. The lubricant and soil samples proved that he entered into the house, and connected him to Max’s and Santora’s murder and with it to the threats to Brennan and our daughter. We already knew that the message that Sawyer wrote with his own saliva was a computer program that corrupted the GPS coordinates sent from the ankle monitor so that the company thought that Pelant was in his house no matter where he was, and Angela had already proved that the program was in the library net and that he hacked it using the chips on the book to get into Sawyer’s asylum and a bunch of other places related to the crimes. The program that read the position of the GPS tracker found in Max’s shoe was also in this net. And if anyone had any doubt that it had been Pelant who hacked into the library net, my agents went behind Flynn’s back and checked that no one had read all the books that had been manipulated but Pelant and the people that read some of them didn’t have the knowledge to hack the system. So we could prove that he was responsible of everything but Ezra Krane’s murder or so I thought until Wendell found a little drop of blood on the boots, on the seam between the soil and the leather, blood that Cam proved was Krane’s.

We could prove that Pelant had murdered Inger Johannsen, Ezra Krane, Ethan Sawyer, Douglas Santora, Max Keenan, and I was sure James Philips too. We could prove that he had committed numerous crimes of hacking, breaking into the house of a federal agent, spying on said federal agent, and threatening Brennan and Christine.

The only problem was catching him before he found them.

Thank God, after forty-eight long, excruciating hours of investigation Angela finally found another GPS tracker in the library net. This one was in New York.

Brennan and our daughter were in New York and Pelant knew it. He had known where they were all the time.

I left the squints and Sweets to finish searching James’ house as I was sure that his body was there somewhere and got into a helicopter with Flynn. Our destination was New York’s Field Office and from there to the coordinates that the tracker gave us.

I found myself praying again, like three days ago, that what we found there wasn’t my baby girl’s body. I prayed that they were alive and safe. I prayed that Pelant was still waiting and had yet to make his move. I prayed that he hadn’t caught them and killed them. I prayed that what we found were Brennan and Christine, not their bodies.

 


	5. Chapter 5

It’s been twelve days since I saw Brennan drive away with our daughter.

It’s been twelve days since Pelant disappeared off of the radar when they took his ankle monitor off leaving him completely and absolutely free to do as he pleased. It’s been twelve days since he killed Max Keenan and Douglass Santora.

In those twelve days we proved that Pelant hacked into the library network and used the chips on the books to send programs through the internet that allowed him to do numerous illegal things like hack into Sawyer’s asylum and cheat his ankle monitor with a program that corrupted the GPS coordinates that it sent to its receptor. We also proved that Pelant had been impersonating his step brother, James Phillips since 2005 when he turned eighteen. Since then he kept the house that Daren Phillips left his son and used it for his own psychopathic purposes: he built all of his techy stuff in there and we could prove that he killed Inger Johannsen there. After searching James’ and Santora’s houses we  could also prove that he killed or at least was somehow connected to five murders: Inger Johannsen, Ezra Krane, Ethan Sawyer, Douglass Santora, and Max Keenan; and to the threats against Brennan and Christine.

But Pelant wasn’t idle in those twelve days. He disappeared off the radar. He killed Max and Santora. He left Max’s body for us to find five days ago, directing us to Santora’s body and making clear that his intentions were to kill Brennan and our daughter.

He has been playing with us in his psychotic game for a very long time, and he was way ahead of us, as proven by the GPS tracker that he had used to monitor Max and the one that now pointed us to New York. I was sure that this second tracker was with Brennan and that he had known where Brennan and our daughter had been all this time.

I left the squints to finish searching James’ house and to go over everything again. Pelant is a smart son of a bitch; if we want to nail him we needed everything that we can find. Plus, I had the feeling that James’ body was still in his house. Meanwhile, a chopper took Flynn and me to the New York Field Office.

I spent the entire trip praying again, like I’ve been doing almost constantly since I saw Brennan’s car drive away, that they were alive and safe. I prayed that Pelant was still waiting and had yet to make his move. I prayed to find Brennan and Christine, not their bodies.

The trip felt longer than the trip to Afghanistan, but in reality, it was short and soon we were in the office debriefing the agents there. Soon we were on our way to East Rockaway in Nassau County (Long Island) were the tracker told us to go. Lights and siren blazing and blaring we sped to our destination, closely followed by the best SWAT team of the area.

When we were getting close, we shut off the sirens and the lights to not alert Pelant of our presence and moments later we turned the corner onto Fifth Avenue to get to Waterview, like any other person going to Waterview.  We were planning on going right down the block on foot while the SWAT team would approach the house from other different points in the block behind to avoid being detected and in minutes the house was surrounded by FBI agents.

The house had been empty for a while now, since its last owner left, and it looked abandoned, but it was still in somewhat livable conditions. It was a small two floor house with an attic, and the only light in it was coming from up there. The light was dim letting us know that the attic wasn’t correctly illuminated either.

I jumped out of the car to meet with the team leader, followed by Flynn who was practically running after me. The team leader introduced himself as Galindez and to my surprise he gave me a vest and a rifle telling me that Johnson said that I was good and trustworthy. I guess that Johnson’s opinion was more important than who was in charge of the Pelant case or what we were doing here exactly. Flynn was by now used to it or he had given up on ever being in charge and was now content with just waiting for us out of harm’s way. He didn't look happy about it, though. He even pouted like a little kid. I felt the strong urge to stick my tongue out at him and goad him a ‘so there!’ but I acted like a big boy and resisted, barely.

“Flynn didn’t argue. He’s gonna stay there looking pretty, right? Not gonna screw up trying to follow us in?” Galindez asked pointing with his thumb to Flynn.

“I think that he’s happy looking pretty out of Pelant’s way.”

Galindez snorted, unimpressed by the agent officially in charge of the case, and we positioned ourselves to go in.

The team opened the door and the agents split up searching the house. Galindez and I found the stairs leading to the attic and ascended them slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible.

We could hear a baby crying and my throat constricted with the unhappy cries. I instantly knew that it was Christine and I needed to use all my self-control to tamper my fear before I panicked and screw it up. Galindez saw my hesitation and stopped a second to look at me, silently asking if it was my baby. With my affirmative nod, we continued up the stairs relieved to know that at least the baby was still alive.

When we reached the top of the stairs we saw that the door was slightly opened leaving a small crack for us to see through it. What we saw froze my blood cold in an instant.

Brennan was tied down to a chair. Her hands were tied together and then to the back of the chair in a strong knot, and her feet were tied to the legs of the chair. She was gagged and making strangled noises through the cloth while her eyes, full of blind terror, were fixed on the man that was barely two feet away from her.

The man in question was Pelant and he was standing by a worktable holding a knife in his right hand over it. To my sheer terror, on the table was Christine in nothing but a diaper.

She was cold, uncomfortable and probably feeling the tension in the room because she was crying inconsolably. And if that wasn’t enough the son of a bitch had made a small cut on her left calf. It wasn’t a big or deep cut but it was bleeding and it was clear that he was going to repeat the action, maybe even do worse any second now.

I took a deep breath to gather total control over my body like I was taught to do in sniper school. I held my rifle steady, ready to fire, and pushed the door open. I aimed and fired, killing Pelant instantly with only one bullet perfectly aimed to his head.

I put my rifle down and walked towards the table, sparing just a glance to Pelant’s body, I picked up Christine and held my baby close to my body as I walked towards the door.

My intentions were clear to the other two occupants of the room: leave the room with the baby. Galindez touched my rifle, ordering me without words to give the rifle to the men outside and then nodded giving me his permission to leave. Galindez and his men could deal with Pelant and Brennan. I needed to take my baby to the hospital.

A small part of my brain registered that Brennan was looking at me from her position in the chair, but a bigger and stronger one knew that she was safe, physically fine and that Galindez would take care of her. Galindez would drive with her in the ambulance to the hospital if needed. What I needed to do was now was care for my baby.

I walked out of the room, climbed down the stairs and walked to the door fast, efficiently, covering Christine with my body. I let my training take us both safely out of the house. I crossed the front door of the house, relinquishing my rifle to the guy that was there, and walked straight to one of the ambulances that were waiting for us. I climbed into it with Christine and ordered them to take us to the hospital. The other ambulance stayed there for Brennan and the SWAT team.

The ambulance drove through the streets fast taking us to the nearest hospital. Meanwhile, the EMT checked Christine as best as he could and did his best to stop the bleeding of her leg.

Some minutes and some very blurry streets later we were at the entrance of the ER of the hospital. I remember almost nothing from that moment on. I have a blurry memory of a blurry doctor trying to take Christine, but she was finally safe in my arms, and I wasn’t ready for that to change. After twelve horrible interminable days of fear and anguish wandering where she was and if she was safe and healthy, I was holding her. I wasn’t going to let him take her away from me. I’m not sure but I think that I hit him somehow. Then another doctor came by, he was equally blurry to the first one but he was smarter. He decided to check Christine while she was in my arms. He didn’t try to take her away.

Then the blurry feeling became too much to bear and everything went black…

 


	6. Chapter 6

Six months ago, Pelant killed Inger Johansen and Ezra Krane. Six months ago, Pelant started to play his game with us. He dared us to catch him. He tried to prove that he was smarter than us.

A fortnight ago, he raised the stakes when he killed Ethan Sawyer and framed Brennan with his murder.

Thirteen days ago, I saw Brennan drive away with our daughter. She ran away in a desperate attempt to protect herself and our daughter from Pelant. She didn’t trust me to protect her and our family so she ran away. It was then that our hunt started.

Six days ago, Pelant left Max’s body for us to find. It took us to Douglas Santora’s home and to his threats to Brennan and Christine. The hunt then became desperate.

Last night, we found him. He had kidnapped Brennan and Christine and he was ready to kill my daughter. I killed him. One shot, one kill. Like the sniper I once was, I fired my rifle and put a bullet in his brain. For the first time in my life I felt no regret over ending someone’s life.

I took my daughter out of the house where we found them and an ambulance drove us to the hospital. The doctors at the hospital wanted to check her out but she was finally safe in my arms and no one was going to take her away from me.

Everything was blurry: my surroundings, the doctors, the lights, everything… I think that I attacked one of the doctors because he wanted to take my baby away. Then someone else came to check her out but he didn’t try to take my baby so I let him near us.

Then everything went black…

* * *

 

Suddenly I was in a hospital room lying on a bed and Christine was in a hospital crib by my side. She was sleeping peacefully, her left calf was bandaged and she was so close to my bed that I could touch her comfortably. I could taste the dry, pasty feeling that the sedatives leave in your mouth, so I knew that they had sedated me. The loss of adrenaline once I was in the ambulance and the crappy sleeping and eating that I’ve been doing for almost two weeks now surely explained why everything had felt so blurry, and the sedatives explained why it later went black.

Now that I was more conscious of my surroundings and in a better frame of mind, I noticed that my daughter and I weren’t alone in the room. Galindez, Johnson, Caroline and Cam were seated at a desk in a corner of the room. They had been playing cards quietly to not disturb us, but they stopped when they noticed that I was awake.

“Welcome back, Big Guy,” Cam said smiling at me softly.

I grunted something that was meant to be a greeting, and she got up to offer me some water. After drinking some of it I was capable of talking a little better and could offer a real greeting.

“Heard that you scared the crap out of one of the docs yesterday, Booth,” Johnson said with a smirk. It was fairly obvious that he found it funny for some reason.

Seeing that I was confused, Caroline decided to explain. “You may not remember it, but you went into full super manly G.I. Joe mode, decided that the good doctor was the Grinch, and attacked him when he was trying to check that beautiful baby of yours.”

Ah, that must have been blurry doctor number one. I nodded to let my companions know that I was remembering things, more or less. “How is Christine?”

“She’s perfectly fine, Booth,” Cam answered honestly. “The cut is superficial. You have nothing to worry about.” I nodded again. “Dr. Brennan has some lacerations and bruises, no doubt from trying to fight Pelant. She was stressed, anxious, and in Luis’ words, she fought the arrest yesterday like a lioness.”

“That’s not what my report says. If you read carefully, you’ll see that she was the picture of collaboration right until she panicked and the EMTs had to knock her out,” Galindez said, contradicting the coroner. He was clearly covering for her. The rest of the team must have informed him of everything and he had decided that Brennan and I deserved some leeway.

“Yep,” Cam said sarcastically. “In any case, seeing that she was altered and that she needed rest because she was exhausted, the doctors have her sedated. Angela and Hodgins are with her waiting for the sedative to wear off. And so is Flynn. We’ve decided to let him do the honors of explaining everything to her.”

“Seemed like the least he could do,” Caroline added with a scowl. “Plus if she Judo-Karate- Kung-fu’s him it won’t be a great loss. The man used all his brain power when he allowed you in the case.” Again I nodded as the only answer and the prosecutor, knowing that I wasn’t feeling particularly well, changed topic a little. “They’ll release you three from here today and we have transport to D.C. ready for that time. David decided that I have the honor of telling you that he’ll be waiting for you there and that you must not talk with Brennan until then, got it?”

I nodded and asked for the legal ramifications of her adventure. “She arrested?”

Caroline nodded sharply. “Yes. She’s charged with evading justice, and kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a minor. Once we close Pelant’s case, the FBI and the DA office will deal with those charges. Until then you’re the only custodian of your rugrat.”

Again I nodded numbly. I knew all this and I’ve know it for a while. Yet it still knocked me out for a loop. For the first time it felt real. I’ve known the legal repercussions of her actions for days, rationally; but emotionally it hadn’t sunk in yet. I knew it but I didn’t feel it. Now I did.

My gloomy mood was obvious and Cam decided that it was time for me to come back to the world of the living for real, so she started talking about the case. “Pelant is dead, but we still have a lot of work to do. There’s a lot of evidence to process from James Phillips’ house and the search team hasn’t even finished yet.”

I lifted my eyebrow. How was it possible that they hadn’t finished searching the house yet?

“We’ve found pieces of at least 10 bodies in the backyard,” Cam said evenly.

I wasn’t surprised by the fact that there were more bodies in that house. Nonetheless, I was rattled. Pelant had managed to kill five people since he got out of jail and more than ten before he even put a foot in there.

“The brother?” I asked, wanting to know if they had found James Phillips’ body. My gut told me that it was at the house.

“The skeletons are in pieces. We have to put them together before we can ID them,” Cam answered frowning. I could see that she was disgusted by Pelant but that she was already in her boss mode and thinking about how to do it in the most efficient way. “I’ve called all the squinterns and put them under Clark’s supervision. They should be arriving at the lab about now with the first shipment of bones. It’s going to be a long process though.”

I nodded again. What else could I do? The only thing we could do now was to process the evidence, ID the victims, and prove that Pelant killed them all. Then we could close the case and inform the families of the victims. I needed to think about the case, to concentrate on the victims and their families. I couldn’t think about Brennan, the consequences of her actions, or our relationship right now. I couldn’t deal with it yet. But before going back to the case, I needed some sleep so I turned to face my baby, put my hand over her small body, and closed my eyes trying to sleep or at least rest some.

* * *

 

It was some time later that the doctor came to check on us. He approached Christine but not before calling my attention by clearing his throat.

“You’re not gonna attack me again, right, Agent Booth?” the doctor asked. Surprisingly, over the fear in his voice, there was some humor too.

“Sorry, Doc.” I apologized to the poor guy, but he dismissed it with a wave of his hand and went to examine Christine.

Once he finished with her, he checked me out, and disconnected me from the monitor and the IV. “You two are good to go. I’ll check Dr. Brennan, and if everything is okay with her, you’ll be on your way home within the hour,” he said and left the room.

* * *

 

We arrived to D.C that night, after a short but exhausting flight, and David was waiting for me with a bag full of things for Christine and her portable crib. From what I gathered, Cam called him from New York, and gave him a list of things to bring with him because Christine and I were sleeping at her house. I was really grateful for her understanding and support. I still couldn’t go back to the house, so I needed some place safe to sleep with my daughter.

David told us that Brennan had arrived with Flynn to the Hoover in the chopper without incident, and that the techs, helped by the squinterns, finally finished their search of James’ house. All the evidence gathered was shipped to the Jeffersonian and we could start working tomorrow morning. He told us that if we process everything and close the case diligently, the powers that be would wait until then to deal with Brennan’s charges, and that it was our best shot to reduce the repercussions for her.

“The more we can put on Pelant, the less they’ll put on Brennan. That’s what you’re saying, right?” Angela asked him.

With David’s affirmative answer, we left the airport for our houses to rest and come back the next day ready to work and nail Pelant with everything we had.

Sadly, even with all the squints and squinterns, Sweets, and even Flynn and I, partnered officially by Hacker for this case, we needed over two weeks to examine all the evidence, and identify his twenty-five victims.

 


	7. Chapter 7

It’s been five years and I still remember those horrible days. I still remember the fear and the anger. Sometimes I even feel that fear. I can still remember the aftermath as if it only happened yesterday.

_Hacker walked in front of us towards the stage in his tailored suit and with his stupid smile. The guy was having way too much fun with this press conference thingy. After more than two weeks of processing endless amounts of evidence and putting together twenty-five skeletons that had been completely torn to pieces we had finally closed both Pelant’s and Brennan’s cases. These cases had created a media mess, and so here we were Hacker, Flynn, Cam, Brennan, and me to give a press conference. We had a memorandum ready for release and we had promised to answer all of their pertinent questions. I personally hated these things, and would pay good money to be anywhere else, but Hacker loves them. Sometimes I think that the only thing he likes about the FBI is giving these press conferences._

_“Good morning ladies and gentlemen of the press. I’m Assistant Director Hacker of the FBI. I’m here to inform you about the Pelant case. Yes, I know that you also want to know about Dr. Brennan’s situation, but I’ll let her boss, Dr. Saroyan, from the Jeffersonian Medico-Legal Lab, to inform you about it later,” Hacker started explaining. He directed his voice to the microphone, and talked slowly and vocalized properly. His stupid smile reappeared after every sentence, and I swear that the guy was enjoying every second of this torture._

_“Now, allow me to start right from the very beginning. Christopher Pelant was born from Eleanor Pelant in D.C. in 1982. When Christopher was seven, his mother got married to Daren Philips, a widower with a two-year old boy, James. Mr. Philips never adopted Christopher and therefore, he kept his name until now. In 2002, while Christopher was in college and James was still only fifteen, both Eleanor and Daren Philips were killed in what looked like a tragic car accident. Now, we know that it wasn’t just a car accident; they were in fact Pelant’s first victims. He made a cut on the tube of the break system insuring that the liquid was leaking eventually leaving the car without breaks at the beginning of a complicated and curvy road. We know this because he kept his account of the process and a piece of the tube with the cut as souvenirs.”_

_The press gasped in horror hearing Hacker’s words. Pelant was a real piece of work, and the journalists were just starting to understand this. The worst part is that this was only the beginning of the story. Christopher Pelant had killed thirty seven people in total, and had attempted to kill another two, one of them a baby in his short thirty-year life._

_Hacker knew that he had the complete attention of the press and continued talking. “James Phillips was transferred into the Foster Care System, while Pelant continued with his college education much more comfortable thanks to his part of the inheritance. James’ part, half of the family’s money and a house, was managed by Mr. Phillips’ lawyer until he turned eighteen in 2005. At that time, James was handed everything. Sadly, Pelant killed him, dismembered his body, and buried him in his own backyard. He then stole his identity and made it look like James was still alive, going to the extreme of earning another degree and finding a job as James Phillips.”_

_Again the press gasped horrified by the fact that Pelant killed his entire family. It was really horrible. He planned it thoroughly, and then executed his plan, killing his family to obtain the full inheritance and gain a house under a fake identity that allowed him to continue killing. Pelant was a psychopath. He found pleasure in killing, and he enjoyed doing it without getting caught. But he couldn’t stop himself from keeping some souvenir from all his victims, in most cases their bodies. And when that wasn’t enough anymore, he found pleasure in playing with us, in taunting us, daring us to prove that we could get him. In his arrogance he made mistakes and we got him._

_“From 2005 to 2011 he killed twenty-four women. The scientists of the Jeffersonian Medico-Legal Lab reconstructed their bodies, and identified all of them. We have already released this information to the families, and you all have been given a file with their names and photographs that we ask you to make public.”_

_I interrupted Hacker, got near the microphone, and explained it. “We want his victims to be remembered, not him.” Hacker gave me a dirty look, but I didn’t care. I glared back._

_I wanted to straighten the press out. This arrogant son of a bitch would love to be famous for his crimes, and the best payback we are going to get is to forget about him and concentrate only on his victims._

_"Yes, like Agent Booth said, it’s the victims that should be remembered,” Hacker added knowing that if he ordered me to shut up he was going to look really bad in front of the press and the public._

_Hacker cleared his throat and continued talking as if the interruption never happened. “In 2011, Christopher Pelant was convicted for a crime of hacking and he spent six months in prison. He was placed on house arrest upon his release from prison. From that moment on, his ankle monitor, that informed us of his location every thirty-eight seconds, and his lack of access to internet gave him an airtight alibi until Angela Montenegro from the Jeffersonian proved that he was capable of accessing the internet using the library net and the chips on the books. This way he was capable of hacking into any system that he wanted including the company supervising his ankle monitor readings. It was after mastering this that he started killing again, and the FBI and the Jeffersonian Medico-Legal Lab were brought into the investigation._

_“I’ll let Agent Booth, as the leading agent of the investigation, continue,” Hacker said forcing me to talk to the press probably to get back at me from interrupting him before because when we discussed this press conference, I was clear that I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Obviously, he had decided to ignore my wishes after I interrupted him during his precious press conference. The guy really loved this circus. I groaned in annoyance, and cleared my throat to cover it up. Then Hacker and I exchanged positions, leaving me in front of the microphone._

_“Good morning. I’m Special Agent Booth, and I was the FBI agent assigned to Pelant’s case at the beginning of the investigation. Like Assistant Director Hacker said, once Pelant was in house arrest he found a way to bypass the restrictions of said arrest and started killing again. This time killing wasn’t enough though. He designed a game to play against the FBI and the scientists of the Jeffersonian Lab. He killed and dared us to catch him leaving clues and riddles for us in the crime scenes and with the bodies.”_

_I could see that I had the complete and utter attention of the media. Every journalist in the room wanted to know what I was going to say next. And to my surprise a certain blonde reporter that I dated sometime ago was one of them. I really didn’t have the time or the energy to think about what was she doing here and not in the middle of some war zone, so I just continued talking. Later on, I discovered that she came only to cover this story and to see for herself that we were all safe and sound. After seeing the news, she had been worried for us._

_“His first victim of this period was Inger Johannsen. Inger was a young woman who was house-sitting for a family that was out of town for a while. Pelant chose her because no one would miss her for a while. He killed her, made a code out of her spine to take us to the rest of her body, and left her skull and spine on the Lincoln Memorial._

_“He also manipulated Ezra Krane, a reporter, a colleague of yours, to direct our investigation where he wanted it, and then when he had no more use for him, he killed him too. The FBI and the Jeffersonian Lab did their best to prove him guilty of these murders but at the time were unable to do so. But it was as a result of this investigation that a number of wrongdoings of the FBI were discovered, and are now being investigated by Internal Affairs.”_

_Krane’s name was going to be tied to his investigation into corruption in the FBI, and we needed to make sure that the press understood that we were investigating them or the name of the organization would be trashed in the papers and on TV. Those guys in those files abused their authority. They should and would be punished once the Internal Affairs’ investigation was over. I was sure of it. Hell! I was doing my own investigation just in case. I’ll make sure that they pay for what they did. I hate crooked cops!_

_“He then stopped killing again until the time for his appeal at the Parole Board came. He killed Ethan Sawyer, a mathematician of genius level and an old friend of Dr. Brennan. Ethan Sawyer lived in an asylum because he suffered from delusional schizophrenia and he was in a secure ward, but he was also the person that discovered how Pelant was cheating his ankle monitor. It was because of that, that Sawyer was a threat to Pelant and he killed him. But he sought a double purpose with this murder. By framing Dr. Brennan with Sawyer’s murder, and manipulating the rest of the team, myself included, he threw us out of the case and obtained complete freedom._

_“Agent Flynn was then placed in charge of Sawyer’s murder investigation, and he issued an arrest warrant against Dr. Brennan. This led Dr. Brennan to run with our daughter in a desperate attempt to protect herself and the baby from Pelant. She ran away with her father’s help and against my wishes. Sadly, Pelant was prepared for that. He killed Max Kennan, the only thing separating him from Dr. Brennan, and left his body for us to find. Kennan’s body held a photograph with an address, Douglass Santora’s address to be specific.”_

_I made a pause for effect. I wanted my next sentence to be burned into their memories. I wanted Pelant’s victims to be the stars of their articles, not their murderer. “Santora was a retired FBI agent, with years of exemplary service in the Bureau, and he will be buried with full honors beside his wife’s grave tomorrow.”_

_After another short pause to make sure that my message was clear, I continued. “What we found in Santora’s house was his body and an elaborate crime scene that made it clear that Pelant had every intention of killing Dr. Brennan and our daughter. Fortunately, Pelant’s arrogance was his downfall. He was so sure that we would never be able to discover how he connected to the internet that he left the library net full of clues, including the program that he used to monitor two GPS trackers: one on Kennan, another on Christine’s car seat._

_“We found them in New York, they had already been kidnapped by Pelant, and a SWAT team rescued them and killed Pelant. And that’s everything that there is to know about the Pelant case. It took us more than two weeks to process all the evidence, but it’s finally closed and done with.”_

_I hoped that they would pass on doing questions, but I knew that it was false hope. I hadn’t finished telling them the story and a reporter was already asking his first question. “Agent Booth, is it true that you were part of that SWAT team and that you were the one that killed Pelant?”_

_“Yes, it’s true,” I answered simply. There wasn’t anything else to say. I wasn’t going to lie, but I wasn’t going to elaborate on that._

_“And is it true, that Pelant was ready to kill your daughter when that happened?” the reporter pushed. I was livid with the question, so I just nodded, unable to answer with words._

_I was extremely grateful to Cam, when she stepped up to the podium forcing me away from it and started talking. “That’s enough questions for now, people,” she said firmly stopping the reporters in their tracks._

_“I’m Dr. Camille Saroyan, the Chief of the Jeffersonian Medico-Legal Lab, and Dr. Brennan’s boss. I can tell you that Dr. Brennan was cleared of the murder charges completely. She did NOT kill Ethan Sawyer. The charges of evading justice and kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a minor could not be denied though. Dr. Brennan did evade justice when she ran away after an arrest warrant was served against her and by taking her daughter at that time she committed kidnapping. However, these actions, even if wrong, were the actions of a scared mother trying to protect her daughter from a psychopath. This is the reason why the DA’s office, the FBI, the Jeffersonian Institution, Agent Booth, as Christine’s father, and Dr. Brennan herself reached an agreement._

_“Dr. Brennan won’t do jail time, but she won’t be allowed to work for any police force or government agency again, with one exception. The Jeffersonian Institution will allow her to continue working for them as long as she doesn’t participate in any cases that we’re entrusted with. She will continue identifying the thousands of skeletons stored in the Institution, and she will continue working in other areas of her discipline of forensic anthropology that are not related to any police force or government agency.”_

_“Thanks, Dr. Saroyan,” Hacker said seeing that the coroner wasn’t going to continue talking. Turning to face the reporters, he opened the round for questions, asking them to pose their questions in order and one at a time._

_Like I expected, their first question was about our relationship. They wanted to know if our relationship survived the ordeal. It really annoyed me, with everything that Pelant did the only thing that worried them was our relationship or more accurately Brennan’s love life. But compared to her, I was the image of calmness; I really thought that she was going to punch the guy that asked that question. I had to tell her that the last thing we needed was more charges against her. I felt real relief when I saw her calm down._

_In the end I had to explain that the trust issues created by the situation had in fact broken our relationship. And it was true. She didn’t trust me to protect my family and I couldn’t simply live life like that, plus now I couldn’t trust her not to run every time things got rough. We also had to explain that the custody judge had given me primary custody, and allowed me to decide the time that Christine spent with her mother, while at the same time forbidding Brennan of making trips out of the state without my written consent. I offered her a half time deal, and she immediately accepted, so Christine will be spending half of her time with each of us._

_I was really happy when the torture ended, and I could leave the room and go back to the FBI daycare where my baby was._

Most days however, I don’t feel the fear anymore and I’m just grateful that my daughter survived the ordeal, and became a happy five, almost six year old girl. I thank God every day for that blessing.

It was complicated at first. A big adjustment for everyone. Brennan and I broke our personal and professional relationship, and we sold our house, I moved to a new apartment with three rooms. She moved too. She worked in limbo, and I worked with the squints. Then, not even two months later, I was promoted and put in charge of D.C. Field Office, so Perotta took my old job, and started working with the squints.

If that adjustment wasn’t small, not even a year later, Rebecca was back from England, and she offered me to sign a better custody agreement now that Parker had a little sister. Of course, I accepted as soon as the words left her mouth, and soon I was juggling two kids, with two different custody schedules. I have Parker the first two weeks of every month, and Christine on alternate weeks. Meaning that the siblings shared me the first week and that I needed to do everything with two kids of very different ages, which was a challenge in and of itself. Only going for groceries with both of them was an adventure. I’m surprised that I’m still sane. On the other hand, the last week of the month I was on my own. At first, I missed them like crazy, missed playing with them, missed the noise, even missed the stress… But with time I adapted to it and I started to see the advantage of having an ‘off duty’ week. I could relax, go out with friends, and even date. 

Through all these complications, Brennan and I were capable of keep being friendly to each other. We weren’t friends anymore, but we were friendly. Surprisingly, the squints split their time between both of us. I would have bet that, with the exception of Cam, I wasn’t going to see much of them again. I was happy to be mistaken, really happy.

I see enough of Brennan to know that she isn’t happy. She works in Limbo way too much, and only comes out to spend time with Christine or for an occasional date. She never sees one man more than four or five times though. She refuses to have any kind of romantic relationship. I talked with her about it or at least tried. I’m no longer in love with her, but I still love her, and I’ll always love her, just like I’ll always love Rebecca, and she is the mother of my daughter so I want her to be happy. She told me that our time together taught her that she is unable to have long-term, monogamous relationships because she is unable to trust people completely. She blames herself for how our relationship ended, and while I tried to convince her that it wasn’t her fault, I know that I wasn’t capable of convincing her. I still think that if she had trust me then, we could have make it.

But life is the way it is. Brennan is not happy, she’s just content, but there’s nothing that I can do for her in that aspect of her life. She’s the only one that can change that, and she doesn’t seem inclined to at the moment.

And myself, what, you’d probably ask yourself. Well, I meet a beautiful woman in the store when I was buying groceries with Parker and Christine, two years ago. Her name is Isabel Booth. Yes, we did get married, a year ago. She’s an Air Force’s pilot but she’s currently working at the Pentagon because she’s five months pregnant. So I’m extremely happy. Even more than normal because today we are having a big dinner to celebrate Christmas, both of my kids are here, and so are their mothers and the squints. Hank will be here soon too as Jared and Padme are driving him here, and my beautiful wife is seated by my side watching Christine being fascinated with the lights and decorations of the tree. The love parents feel for their kids is something special, different to any other kind of love, and if I learned something out of all this is that it can change everything. It can destroy the strongest of relationships or it can strengthen them until they are unbreakable. The actions Brennan and I took due to our love for Christine destroyed our relationship, but I know in my heart that now it would be different. Isabel and I won’t suffer the same fate, our marriage will be strengthened by that love.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for readying. I hope you liked it. Please let me know what you think about it.


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